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Oct 1, 2014

Ebola Comes To America: First U.S. Ebola Case Just Diagnosed In Texas

Ebola has arrived in America: A patient in Texas has been diagnosed with the deadly disease, the CDC confirmed on Tuesday.

It is the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States. That’s
an important distinction because — unlike the medical workers who contracted Ebola in Africa
and were flown back to the United States for treatment — the new Ebola
patient could’ve been circulating in the general U.S. population,
potentially spreading the disease.

that each case of Ebola in the current outbreak is producing about 1.3

to 1.8 secondary cases, on average. And that pace of transmission is

especially troubling given Africa’s weak public health response,

Chowell-Puente writes:

To break the chain of the current Ebola epidemic, our numbers show
that health-care workers need to stop about 50 percent of infectious
contacts by effectively isolating people who are infectious…

The trouble is that the countries suffering from outbreaks have weak
health-care systems – perhaps too weak to halve the number of
infectious contacts.

These countries lack gloves, gowns, face masks and other essential
supplies to protect nurses and doctors from infection, and they don’t
have an adequate surveillance system to catch and identify Ebola cases
in a timely way. The number of doctors and health centers is small as
well.

There are signs for hope, however. In Africa, Nigerian public officials have successfully “broken

Ebola’s initial symptoms include fever, headache, diarrhea, and
vomiting — all of which sound misleadingly common and relatively
treatable. But the disease can quickly progress, with mortality rates of
upward of 70%.

“At the end stage of the disease, you have small leaks in blood
vessels,” Thomas Geisbert, an immunologist at the University of Texas
Medical Branch at Galveston, told NPR in August. “You end up with essentially no blood pressure. Your body temperature drops and you go into shock.”

That’s largely because Ebola can provoke a “cytokine storm” in the
body, as the immune system launches an all-out response to fight off the
disease — which simultaneously ravages a human body, damages blood
vessels, and further lowers blood pressure to dangerous levels.